Freedom freedom freedom hoi!
I think that’s a song in a Futurama episode.
Anyway, I handed in my folio on Friday... yay! It went pretty well in the end, after some disappointing drama. The disappointing drama was that I spent about 16 hours on Thursday night/friday setting up renders of several interiors of my building (for light studies and all that jazz), and I didn’t render most of them at home because renders take literally hours to finish on a normal computer, but at uni we have a render farm. (it’s a collection of 16 quad core servers which just do renders... or something. I don’t really know that much about it. I just know that it can render something that takes a normal computer 6 hours in 6 minutes.) So, I did a few medium-scale test renders (the biggest was about 3cm x 3.2cm when you print them) to make sure that everything looked as I wanted, finished up everything and went to uni for the last few hours.
Yeah, the render farm was down. Then it was up again, and I discovered that it wouldn’t render with any of my materials, even though I’d copied them to my external hard drive and they were all properly linked. That was ok, I just told the renderer to use a blanket material over the whole model (it was the lighting that I really cared about) but still no dice. I only had 4 hours to go, and I had to do a few other things: no time to do renders on my macbook, and you get booted from the computer labs if you use lab computers to do local renders. Worst ever! So all I had were the two tiny renders I had done that morning to represent 16 hours of work. I could have cried. It was so disappointing!
Luckily when I printed, those two renders didn’t end up too pixelated (I dragged them out in Indesign to be about an A6 size each, so this is pretty surprising!) but still I am pretty cut about it. :(
Other than that though, everything else turned out awesome.
And it’s done! I’m free till second semester starts. Awesome. Weirdly, I’ve done an entire semester and haven’t gotten a single mark back for any of the assignments that I’ve submitted. I’ve no idea how this semester has gone! Strange. I’m sure it’s fine?
Man, I am bad at updating my journal these days. I started writing this on Saturday! Now it’s Thursday!
So anyway, now folio is over and I get to be An Interesting Person again. I’m happy with that. Although I feel like just chilling all the time since this semester has been so intense. Directly in line with that, on Saturday I brought some new PJs. I was in desperate need. Seriously. I am not going to put in a picture of my old pjs, but they were pink, white, green and orange striped. I don’t think I need to say any more. So I lashed out and while Gavin & I were chilling at Garden City, I brought some pants from Peter Alexander. Funny thing is, they aren’t even PJ pants. They are day pants. Apparently. Although they are velour so since I am not Zapp Brannigan I wouldn’t really wear them out. Except maybe to the gym? Anyway they are luxurious luxurious pj pants. Really soft. They are probably the most boring of the things that PA sells, but I am tired of flannelette pyjamas. (I got the dark grey ones. As much as I like purple, the purple velour was waay too much.)
And then I brought a singlet from target to match because I refuse to pay $25 for a black singlet, even if it is pretty and has a cute little rose on it... (The target singlet cost $15 and is grey & stripey. Pretty nice and $10 cheaper.. Win! When you have paid $50 for pants it is good to save on singlets. I know, I am as scandalised as you are. Except I have amazingly soft non-pj pj pants.)
I may have updated my WoW patches last night. I haven’t re-activated yet but I don’t know what I’m waiting for. I think I am a little bit scared to start playing it on my mac in case it is rubbish. I am a bit sad at my choice so far. So far, it hasn’t been easier or better (in terms of architecture), half because the only Windows OS I have so far is Vista, but also because I really don’t know what I’m doing with this OS yet. Eh. Also I haven’t been able to find drivers for my beloved Logitech G5. :( Logitech, why can’t you just do drivers for OSX? It would make my life so much better.
I noticed that Razer has a gaming mouse with Mac support. They seem like a pretty good brand, I might try it. I don’t want to buy a new mouse when there’s nothing wrong with my old one except for the drivers. :/
But then there is the mighty mouse. I don’t know if it would be that good though. I tried using one in a store and it didn’t appear to have multi-touch support? Maybe it was an old one? It is meant to have that, right?
Oh yeah. It was Gavin’s birthday last wednesday, I brought him Ugg boots and managed to keep it as a real surprise. Yay! He also is amazing, because he spent all of his day off (he doesn’t work wednesdays) helping me make my model awesome. He is pretty good at model making. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised, since doing intricate, tiny work really accurately is basically his job. I would expect that cutting and gluing together an architectural model is easier than sculpting fillings.
Went to an engagement party on Saturday night, for one of Gavin’s oldest friends. It was lovely! Hannah (one of the couple) is an amazing cook and her mum is a coeliac, so she baked all of these amazing mini-mini cupcakes (they looked so professional and delicious!) and Gavin could eat them all! Seriously, they were the most adorable cupcakes I have ever seen.
I’m working in earnest on my online portfolio now. I think I’m going to make base it around wordpress, although I haven’t decided for sure yet. I may just code it all. I don’t really like the idea of presenting my work in a blog style. It just doesn’t seem that professional. Since I’ll be using it to get a job, this is pretty important. So it will have to be an exercise in minimalist sophistication. Muted, pastel colours, probably. Hopefully I can also make it not boring. I’m only going to post pictures when I’m happy with it. So that it’s more impressive? I don’t know.
Anyway this post is getting really long so I think I’ll wrap it up there.
Anyway, I handed in my folio on Friday... yay! It went pretty well in the end, after some disappointing drama. The disappointing drama was that I spent about 16 hours on Thursday night/friday setting up renders of several interiors of my building (for light studies and all that jazz), and I didn’t render most of them at home because renders take literally hours to finish on a normal computer, but at uni we have a render farm. (it’s a collection of 16 quad core servers which just do renders... or something. I don’t really know that much about it. I just know that it can render something that takes a normal computer 6 hours in 6 minutes.) So, I did a few medium-scale test renders (the biggest was about 3cm x 3.2cm when you print them) to make sure that everything looked as I wanted, finished up everything and went to uni for the last few hours.
Yeah, the render farm was down. Then it was up again, and I discovered that it wouldn’t render with any of my materials, even though I’d copied them to my external hard drive and they were all properly linked. That was ok, I just told the renderer to use a blanket material over the whole model (it was the lighting that I really cared about) but still no dice. I only had 4 hours to go, and I had to do a few other things: no time to do renders on my macbook, and you get booted from the computer labs if you use lab computers to do local renders. Worst ever! So all I had were the two tiny renders I had done that morning to represent 16 hours of work. I could have cried. It was so disappointing!
Luckily when I printed, those two renders didn’t end up too pixelated (I dragged them out in Indesign to be about an A6 size each, so this is pretty surprising!) but still I am pretty cut about it. :(
Other than that though, everything else turned out awesome.
And it’s done! I’m free till second semester starts. Awesome. Weirdly, I’ve done an entire semester and haven’t gotten a single mark back for any of the assignments that I’ve submitted. I’ve no idea how this semester has gone! Strange. I’m sure it’s fine?
Man, I am bad at updating my journal these days. I started writing this on Saturday! Now it’s Thursday!
So anyway, now folio is over and I get to be An Interesting Person again. I’m happy with that. Although I feel like just chilling all the time since this semester has been so intense. Directly in line with that, on Saturday I brought some new PJs. I was in desperate need. Seriously. I am not going to put in a picture of my old pjs, but they were pink, white, green and orange striped. I don’t think I need to say any more. So I lashed out and while Gavin & I were chilling at Garden City, I brought some pants from Peter Alexander. Funny thing is, they aren’t even PJ pants. They are day pants. Apparently. Although they are velour so since I am not Zapp Brannigan I wouldn’t really wear them out. Except maybe to the gym? Anyway they are luxurious luxurious pj pants. Really soft. They are probably the most boring of the things that PA sells, but I am tired of flannelette pyjamas. (I got the dark grey ones. As much as I like purple, the purple velour was waay too much.)
And then I brought a singlet from target to match because I refuse to pay $25 for a black singlet, even if it is pretty and has a cute little rose on it... (The target singlet cost $15 and is grey & stripey. Pretty nice and $10 cheaper.. Win! When you have paid $50 for pants it is good to save on singlets. I know, I am as scandalised as you are. Except I have amazingly soft non-pj pj pants.)
I may have updated my WoW patches last night. I haven’t re-activated yet but I don’t know what I’m waiting for. I think I am a little bit scared to start playing it on my mac in case it is rubbish. I am a bit sad at my choice so far. So far, it hasn’t been easier or better (in terms of architecture), half because the only Windows OS I have so far is Vista, but also because I really don’t know what I’m doing with this OS yet. Eh. Also I haven’t been able to find drivers for my beloved Logitech G5. :( Logitech, why can’t you just do drivers for OSX? It would make my life so much better.
I noticed that Razer has a gaming mouse with Mac support. They seem like a pretty good brand, I might try it. I don’t want to buy a new mouse when there’s nothing wrong with my old one except for the drivers. :/
But then there is the mighty mouse. I don’t know if it would be that good though. I tried using one in a store and it didn’t appear to have multi-touch support? Maybe it was an old one? It is meant to have that, right?
Oh yeah. It was Gavin’s birthday last wednesday, I brought him Ugg boots and managed to keep it as a real surprise. Yay! He also is amazing, because he spent all of his day off (he doesn’t work wednesdays) helping me make my model awesome. He is pretty good at model making. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised, since doing intricate, tiny work really accurately is basically his job. I would expect that cutting and gluing together an architectural model is easier than sculpting fillings.
Went to an engagement party on Saturday night, for one of Gavin’s oldest friends. It was lovely! Hannah (one of the couple) is an amazing cook and her mum is a coeliac, so she baked all of these amazing mini-mini cupcakes (they looked so professional and delicious!) and Gavin could eat them all! Seriously, they were the most adorable cupcakes I have ever seen.
I’m working in earnest on my online portfolio now. I think I’m going to make base it around wordpress, although I haven’t decided for sure yet. I may just code it all. I don’t really like the idea of presenting my work in a blog style. It just doesn’t seem that professional. Since I’ll be using it to get a job, this is pretty important. So it will have to be an exercise in minimalist sophistication. Muted, pastel colours, probably. Hopefully I can also make it not boring. I’m only going to post pictures when I’m happy with it. So that it’s more impressive? I don’t know.
Anyway this post is getting really long so I think I’ll wrap it up there.